


A Song of Seasons

by kenaz



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: 4th Age, Coming of Age, Gen, Gondor, Ithilien, Old Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:37:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seasons, like youth, must pass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Song of Seasons

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Alex_Quine for the 2013 [Sons of Gondor](http://sons-of-gondor.livejournal.com/) Trick or Treat Exchange

_Sing a song of seasons_

_Something bright in all_

_Flowers in the summer_

_!Fires in the fall_

Robert Louis Stevenson - 

  
  


_**I. Laer** _

On the day Eldarion returns to Gondor, the air is hot and stolid. He stands before his father in the audience chamber trying without success to hide his discomfort and surreptitiously tugging at his collar.

“Legolas says that when the Anduin passes around Cair Andros it creates its own breezes, and that is why it is so much more comfortable in Ithilien,” he remarks.  The lads around him mutter and nod.

After they’ve made all the appropriate greetings and clasped all the hands requiring clasping, Aragorn shoos them off to change out of their riding leathers and starched coats and into more merciful garb, yet he is sorry that the first moment of their reunion has been marred by the crankiness of a boy fresh from the road and ambivalent about his return.

“It is hard to come home,” Arwen reminds him. Gondor is governed by schedules and formalities; and where, in Ithilien, he is one of many youths learning the ways and manners of the court, in Gondor he is Prince Eldarion, the King’s Son. The initial fortnight after he returns each summer and gracelessly drops his bags in his childhood room are always the same: tentative, awkward...miserable...until they find their footing once again. Arwen, wise in the ways of the young, bade Faramir send Elboron and some other young men from the Steward’s court to accompany him this time, hoping the presence of friends would ease the transition.  

And so a half-dozen lads have come, and now they go crashing about, hither and yon, up and down the stairs, and round and round the courtyards. They cannot do anything quietly. In his son’s absence, Aragorn had forgotten how young men expand to fill all available space in a room with their belongings, their bodies, their spirit. And now these youths, bred of Gondor and of Rohan and of Ithilien, seem to overflow the walls of Minas Tirith, and Aragorn is from moment to moment charmed and exasperated.  He wonders how Faramir tolerates it the bulk of the year, and resolves to pack the lads off with fine gifts upon their return: good brandy for Faramir, and sweets for the lady Eowyn.

“Legolas says…”

Aragorn does not hear the rest, nor does he need to. He finds he cannot remember a time when Eldarion did not start his sentences thus, as if the Elf were the font of all knowledge. This, coupled with the rucked brow and down-turned mouth supplies a variety of unspoken perorations to the boy’s speech:

_Legolas is an Elf, and you are only a man._

Or, more damning, _Legolas is there and you are not._

This is the price to be paid, he supposes, for fostering the boy under Eowyn’s watchful eye and Faramir’s restraining wisdom…and, of course, under Legolas’ skillful hand.  In his own youth, he had been taken to Imladris for his safety, and for the safety of his faltering tribe, any hint of identity and lineage obscured.  Eldarion’s lineage is a secret to no-one, and Aragorn fosters out his own son for kinder reasons: to strengthen bonds between those who had long been loyal to the line of the Stewards and those who welcomed the return of Elendil’s heir. Some day, these very lads he can hear outside his window howling over bawdy jokes and the less couth functions of the body will serve Eldarion and answer to him, and he should be familiar to them, trusted by them, beloved of them-- not a stranger in a shabby Ranger’s cloak, as he had been, with only a broken sword to speak for him.  

Already he has had more years with Eldarion, and more again, than he ever had with his own father. Arathorn had been barely more than a revered name, a shadow in his memory: wet wool, the rumble of a low voice in the night, the rough pads of fingers that caressed his cheek and brow in the darkness before departing again in silence. He had wept when he had learned of his father’s death, but in truth, he knew not why his heart ached so badly for a stranger. It was an obtuse pain, an abstract longing, something not entirely rooted in his heart. _I will not_ , he had promised himself, _be a stranger to my own son_.

But Arwen had insisted. Perhaps because she saw the obvious benefits to all parties in such an arrangement, and perhaps because native prescience guided her. Not all Men knew or trusted Elves, she was quick to remind him, and Eldarion’s lineage could make him suspect to those of smaller mind or lesser knowledge. He must be known and loved for his own merits, she had counseled, and raised in a court where Men held sway. And he deferred to her in this, because if a mother could part with her only son without her heart breaking, so, then, must a father bear it in good grace.  Ithilien was not so very far away, after all.

But it was far enough. In each awkward transition, he regrets the choice not to keep Eldarion close at hand. He is in the full blush of youth and vigor now, his face and form so close to a man’s, and yet still so far. He is mercurial, laughing one moment, sullen and secretive the next.  Despite the familiarity of his features, this creature, all wild appetites and will, is a stranger.

 

* * *

  
  
  


Weeks pass. Whatever stiffness first assailed Eldarion has given way, and he assumes his rightful position as the favorite of everyone in the palace, from the simple scullery maid who blushes fiercely in his presence to Aragorn’s greyest advisors. The Prince has returned in spirit, as well as in body.  

The heat peaks and finally breaks; the air in Gondor is suffused in a warm glow at dawn and dusk when the rabble descends from their quarters, or stumbles in from a long day of riding or hunting or whatever boys’ business it is they have gotten themselves up to. At day’s first light and day’s last, they threaten to eat his stores down to the bare shelves, and the screens passage at the foot of the great hall hosts a constant parade in and out of the kitchens. Aragorn cannot quite find it in him to begrudge them the ease of their lives, or that their swordplay and horsemanship have been tested only in sport and not in battle, contests with friends for cheers and the favours of sweet girls. Surrounded by his companions, he laughs easily and smiles often, and Aragorn sees much of Arwen in his features, the Elvish touch of endless youth.

But, no, he corrects himself: he has looked long into his wife’s eyes, and into the eyes of Elrond and of Legolas, lucent and discerning...and ancient. Their faces do not bear the ravages of age and time, but their eyes hold a multitude of losses and of sorrows. No, one could not look in the eyes of the Elves and imagine them young in the way that Eldarion is young.

“Legolas says…” The familiar refrain is pronounced around a mouth full of supper.

“We know!” Elboron interrupts, slapping the table in mock exasperation, the broad hand rattling his plate and cup. He is a handsome lad, Elboron, fair and canny as his father, but Aragorn thinks he bears a greater share of his uncles’ blood: he is impatient like Boromir, blunt like Éomer. He is a good companion to Eldarion, earthy where Eldarion has more the qualities of air. Aragorn bows his head over the papers he has been scanning so that the boys do not see him smile. He remembers his own youthful pride being intolerant to others’ mirth.

Mock threats are exchanged, retributions promised, a mug overturned-- accidentally, it is sworn--into someones’ lap, and, after a great deal of pointing and laughing between themselves, they are up and off again like a pack of hounds, all brawn and mouth and very little brain shared between them.

“Sweet mercy of Elbereth, I hope he is not so brutish Ithilien,” he grumbles once the tumult has passed.

Arwen chuckles. “He is a guest there, and knows himself your emissary. He would sooner die than shame you.” She leans into him, her weight chiding and gentle, even as her gaze remains steadily on her embroidery.

“These are but the last throes of boyhood,” she says, raising her clear eyes from her tambour frame at last and looking first at him, and then at the afternoon light limning the edges of the window beyond. He does not think she notices him watching her fingers move tenderly, almost longingly, across the goldwork that has blossomed under her expert hand. The outline of a mallorn leaf reveals itself subtly in the velvet.

 _And these are but the last throes of summer_ , he thinks in return.

  
  
  


_**II. Iavas** _

The sun sets earlier these days, and there is a slight snap to the air at night. Elboron and his merry fellows have returned home, their wild flight thither, Aragorn hopes, stifled to a dull roar by the added weight in their saddle bags of gifts for the Steward and his wife. This assumes they don’t get into the brandy themselves between here and there.  But no, he considers, Elboron is a sensible lad, and the others will defer to him as they deferred to Eldarion.

But Eldarion withdraws into himself after their departure, as if to make himself less conspicuous. Without his noisy coterie, there is no escaping from the truth of the matter: that he is the King’s Son, the heir to Gondor’s throne with uncanny Elven eyes, to be flattered, and served, and catered to.  Aragorn sees that it discomfits him, but there is little to be done for it: this is what it is to be a prince, and Eldarion needs must learn to bear the stares and the whispers and the people who bow and recede from rooms making a great show of never giving him their back.

Even Aragorn must admit that he misses the unfettered life and laughter the boys brought with them, even as he does not miss the noise and smell of them.

And yet, their absence means that Eldarion is _his_ once more. They break their fasts alone together, with no attendants, as if they were merely some crofter and his boy. They say little, but the silence between them is softer now. He is always bright and alert, restless, even at that early hour, as if he has been awake and about for some time, but Aragorn does not ask; the lad’s time, when not spent in service to his father chores and his father’s court, is his own. A boy deserves some secrets of his own.

One morning, over a plate of warm scones, Eldarion tilts his head and narrows his eyes, a remarkable and uncalculated approximation of his mother’s look. “Your hair is grayer than it was last summer.”

Aragorn laughs, pained. “Well. Thank you for noticing.”

He repeats this exchange to Arwen later, surprised by the way the sting has lingered, and she brushes the hair from his brow and lays a line of kisses across it.  “He does not like to think of you growing old.”

 _Nor do I_ , she does not say, though he feels the weight of the words unspoken.

 

* * *

  
  
  


Unable to sleep one night, he rises just before the sun, removing to his study so as not to disturb Arwen.  As he leaves the room, he sees that two more leaves have blossomed on the tambour frame, smaller than the first, framing it. Father, mother, son, his family writ in thread of gold.

Behind them, and partially obscured, are the inchoate outlines of two elanor blossoms.

His mind, though, is not long on embroidery. He glances out the window, and in the first wan light spies Eldarion well below, chinning himself on the limb of a great and ancient oak, rising and descending until his arms shake. _A tree-limb?_ he wonders, thinking of the fine facilities Denethor had built to train up the forces of Gondor, the salles and training arenas with weights for lifting and ropes for climbing...

He thinks, _Ah, yes. Of course, a tree._  

And when the lad has finished with the tree, he returns to his cloak, neatly folded and set in the crook of two mighty roots, and retrieves two knives from its folds. Theirs is not a Mannish make, but long and slender, with handles carved from bone. Alone in the cool and colorless dawn, Eldarion leaps and twists, and the blades glint lowly. Aragorn knows these forms. He has watched Legolas perform this same solemn, solitary dance on many mornings darker than this.

_“Legolas says…”_

Aragorn sees, has always seen, something bright and fey in Eldarion, as if his mother’s blood were surging through him, burning out in one bright and final flame. The world is smaller now, if briefly safer and at peace, and there seems no more room for the great magics of Wizards, nor even for the lesser magics of the Elves.  Men stand alone now, to flourish on their own merit, with the memory of older glory, and with the last of these lessons passed from the Firstborn to Illuvatar’s second sons. It is little wonder that Elvish blood, even diluted, should yearn toward Elvish blood, should hearken to those ancient mysteries that are almost, but not quite, his to claim.

Well, if this is where he turns his eye, Aragorn thinks, so be it. He could make a worse choice than one of the greatest heroes of the Third Age. Though perhaps he might have done better to set his sights lower, on that count.  

There would be heartbreak, but heartbreak makes a man.

He lays a fresh sheet of paper on his desk, wets his quill, and pens a letter he should have seen his way clear to write far sooner.

  
  
  
  


_**III. Lasse-Lanta** _

Night, some weeks later. Aragorn's head is wreathed in pipe-smoke and  just at his shoulder, a shadow peels away from the cold stone of the terrace wall. He smiles with his teeth clamped against his pipe-stem.

"You could have come in through the great hall like everyone else," he says, not turning. “It is customary for guests to be announced.”

"It was late. Unnecessary fanfare."

"You would rather scale the walls and steal into Minas Tirith like a thief?"

He hears the rustle of cloth, the subtle sound of a shrug. "Perhaps Minas Tirith needs higher walls."

He chuckles, and Legolas steps into the light cast by the lamps inside. He throws back the deep hood of his traveling cloak, and for a moment, Aragorn is dazzled by the preternatural radiance of his skin, and the sharp flint of his eyes. He smells of sage and rosemary, of wisdom and remembrance.

“So.” Legolas says. “Eldarion.”

"He reveres you, you know." Aragorn hopes he has kept the faint note of resentment from his voice.

Legolas smiles at him kindly. "Of course he does."

Aragorn draws long on his pipe before molding his lips to a wry scowl. "Elbereth spare me from the pride of Elves!"

Legolas' smile broadens, and his eyes twinkle. "I am not his father; it costs him nothing to revere me. What I have to offer is quite simple in comparison: how to wield Silvan blades, how to shoot from horseback, how to climb a tree with stealth."

“It is more than that, I think.”  He taps the bowl of his pipe against the balustrade and takes his time repacking it. The occupation of his hands buys him time to sort the complexity of his thoughts into one simple sentence. “He is… fond of you.”

Legolas does not answer straight away. Aragorn views him out of the tail of his eye and wonders where his friend’s thoughts have taken him, how many years into the past, or how many leagues across the sea.

“He is young yet, Aragorn. He does not know his mind.  But he knows his duty.”

“And fears it?” Aragorn asks.

Slowly, Legolas nods. “Perhaps.”

The bald truth makes Aragorn feel helpless. He cannot shield his son from his birthright; it simply is as it is.

“Your shadow is longer than you realize,” Legolas says softly. “Eldarion knows that when people look at him, they are taking his measure against yours, weighing his worthiness. He fears to fall short of their expectations, and of yours.”

It occurs to Aragorn then that it is not merely the Elf’s beauty that has drawn Eldarion’s eye, but his apparent agelessness and lack of accountability. Legolas comes and goes as he pleases, and is beholden to no man-- save Aragorn, perhaps, and then he is bound only by the loyalties of a friendship which has been tempered in the hottest of fires and blackest of nights.  Eldarion’s eyes, though keener than an average man’s, fail to see yet what Aragorn’s see: the wearying ebb of time on an Elf’s soul, the magnitude of loss which Legolas has known before, and the loss that awaits him yet: the knowledge that he must someday leave his home not, as Eldarion leaves his childhood bed, for a few seasons at a stretch, but until the world’s end.

“He has so much yet to learn,” Aragorn whispers. Nineteen years is not enough. It is but a child’s span, he is still a boy, for all his posturing. Aragorn is overwhelmed by it, wants to hide him away and shelter him from the world’s hurts and the world’s painful truths until he is a man in full.

“He will,” Legolas tells him with compassionate certainty. “He still has time.”

Aragorn hears him exhale slowly before he says, more softly, “I, too, have time, Aragorn.”

After that, they stand for a long, long while in silence.

“The wheel of the year is turning swiftly.” Aragorn makes the pronouncement definitively, feeling suddenly called into action. Only yesterday, it seemed, the air had been summer-hot and filled with the shouts and laughter of bored youths. Now the leaves are daily shifting from green to red and gold and brown, and soon they will give up their grip on the branches. “He’ll be cooped up all winter long, sitting in on my councils and learning the tedium that is to be his duty. I should like him to have one last adventure before he assumes the responsibilities that await him.”

They bend their heads toward one another at exactly the same time, and Aragorn feels the depth of his gratefulness, the depths of the trust he bears for his truest companion. They know each others’ thoughts and ways deeply, even if his duties mean they spend little time together. They are beyond all that, he knows. After walking through blood and fire, a man has no need of formal dinners or long letters that pay token homage to a friendship’s true worth. Only Arwen does he trust so totally, so implicitly.

“I am expected in Eryn Galen in a fortnight’s time. I had planned to pass the winter there.”

“Eldarion would be more than pleased to see the land of your birth, and to meet your lord father.”

Legolas squints and sniffs the air. “The frosts will be on us soon, and I did not come packed for my journey. I’ll need to return to Ithilien to make ready, and Eldarion should prepare to depart soonest. Have him meet me in three days.

“I’ll not wait,” he warns.  “It does not do to keep my lord father waiting.”

“He’ll be there in two, if I know him,” Aragorn assures, vertiginous waves of relief and uncertainty wracking him in tandem.  “Will you stay the night and break your fast with us in the morning? Arwen would be pleased to see you.”

But Legolas has already pulled up the hood of his cloak, and his face reclaimed by darkness.

After he has gone-- over the wall and into the night, just as he had come-- Aragorn goes to Eldarion’s rooms, but they are dark. Mot wishing to disturb the boy, he slides a note under his door: _make ready to ride post-haste,_ it says. _Legolas has need of you in Ithilien_. And knowing it is his son’s habit to rise early to practice with his Elvish knives and to chin himself on the old oak, he plans to rise early himself, and see him off.

 

* * *

 

The problem with youths--particularly those who have finally discovered that the mantle of manhood they so desperately craved is, in actuality, quite heavy, and as itchy as wool-- is that they are contrary creatures. The boy who has risen before the sun each day suddenly decides that it is all just futility, and he may as well sleep the day away.

Aragorn rises, washes, and looks out the window of his study. The oak is enshrouded in a fine cloak of mist, its burnished leaves dulled like flames behind smoke. But Eldarion is not there, and the fine breakfast he has arranged is untouched.

In the kitchens, no one has seen him, not even the blushing scullery girl who seems to track his every step.

He dashes to Eldarion’s rooms and sees his note on the threshold where he had left it the night before. He curses the idiocy of men and boys alike and raps hard against the door.  A low groan precedes the deliberately slow shuffle of bare feet across the floor. The boy’s face, when he opens his door at last, bears the imprint of his sheets, and his hair stands out in every direction.  He looks dazedly at his father for a moment, and then with concern.

“Has something happened?”

Aragorn sighs broadly. “No, but I hadn’t thought you’d pick today of all days to play the slugabed.” He pokes the lad with the folded paper. Eldarion takes it, reads it, and his eyes grow wide.

“Oh!  Oh no! Father, I’ve got to go!”

“Yes,” Aragorn snorts. “I daresay you should have been on your horse an hour ago.”  

But his words only tumble off his son’s retreating back, and the sleepy rhythm of the morning becomes a cacophony of stomping and chattering as Eldarion hops through his rooms, trying simultaneously to dress himself and pack his bags, barking out a list of things he must have.

“I’ll have the cook pack you breakfast for the road.”

“There isn’t time!” Eldarion wails. “I’m such an oaf! I should never have been so lazy!”

As the whirlwind picks up speed, Aragorn decides it is best to stay out of its path.

And yet, as he strides back through the screens passage toward the kitchens, his nose catches a whiff of sage and rosemary. The scullery girl is filling finely-tooled saddle bags with apples, hard rolls, and cheeses, and Legolas sits comfortably at the table’s end, tucking into bowl of porridge.  At Aragorn’s look of surprise, he merely shrugs.

“I thought,” he says between bites, “perhaps I ought to stay the night after all. And a good thing, too.”

A clatter and crash behind them marks Eldarion’s harried progress, a thump as he unceremoniously drops his packs on the floor.  His face, when his eyes spy Legolas, turns as bright as Aragorn has ever seen it, a flower yearning toward the sun.

Soon after, he stands with Arwen in the courtyard, watching two horses recede into the distance. The dampness in the air feels distinctly melancholy, and yet, as the pair passes beyond his sight, the kindly autumn sun is diligently climbing the sky, dispelling the last of the morning’s mist in its course. Soon the leaves will blaze like torches and wreaths of gold, and the wistful chill will be vanquished by the brightness of the day. A breeze picks up dead leaves, teases them across the cobbles and lifts them briefly to dance on an updraft. Soon all the boughs will be bare, he thinks, and the snow will fall. But new buds will blossom soon enough, and after that, Eldarion will return, the mantle of manhood resting on his shoulders as easily as it ever rests on any man’s.

He does not say to Legolas, _protect him,_ because there is no need. Legolas would give his life for the lad. And if it is not his life but his heart which needs protecting, well...he hopes he is not doing them both an well-meant unkindness. No boy came to manhood without bearing a few scars, some seen, and some unseen. This last autumn idyll must play itself out as it will, and the best and wisest thing he can do is to stand aside.

The last throes of boyhood, Arwen had said.  And so they were.

Arwen’s gaze follows them long after his own eyes have failed him. He thinks of her fingertips grazing golden thread, and the inchoate outline of two small flowers peeking out from behind the gilded leaves. He wends his fingers through hers, and brings her knuckles to his lips.

“I imagine that daughters, in their own way, are more difficult than sons.”

He can almost feel the seeds of her hope take root as her hand clutches tightly in his.

“Perhaps,” he ponders aloud, “I shall know for myself by the last throes of another summer.”

  
  
  



End file.
